Welcome to Indie App Spotlight. This is a weekly 9to5Mac series where we showcase the latest apps in the indie app world. If you’re a developer and would like your app featured, get in contact.
If you’re someone who spends a lot of time on their Mac, you might often find yourself wanting to control one of your lights, thermostats, or just check on your camera. At the same time, you might not love Apple’s Home app.
Itsyhome adds all of the home controls you’ll need to your Mac’s menu bar – and it isn’t even HomeKit exclusive. It also supports Home Assistant, and has loads of useful features under the hood.
Top features
First things first, you aren’t locked into Apple’s HomeKit ecosystem here. If you’re someone who uses Home Assistant, you’re also able to take advantage of Itsyhome’s feature set.
Everything smart home related that you’d like to control is available right in your menu bar. That includes lights, thermostats, fans, air conditioners, door locks, and cameras. The app lists out every individual room for easier parsing, and you can rearrange rooms and devices to your liking. You can also create customs groups for easier batch control – or pin certain devices so they’re instantly available at the top.
Itsyhome lets you hide certain items if you don’t want easy access. The app also offers keyboard shortcuts and Stream Deck integration for quickly toggling your most important smart home devices with a simple keybind.
Lastly, it offers a companion Apple TV remote app – perhaps one of the coolest features! If you want to adjust your Apple TV without using the phone app or a physical remote, you can. It even has a built in app launcher so you don’t need to navigate the home screen.
Download the app
Itsyhome is available for free on the Mac App Store for Macs running macOS 14.0 Sonoma and later. For the features not available in the free version – theres no subscription required, so you’ll only need to pay $12.99 once to unlock everything – like cameras, iCloud sync, and webhook integration.
It’s also fully open source, with its source code available on GitHub.
My favorite Apple accessory recommendations:
Follow Michael: X/Twitter, Bluesky, Instagram
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
